Workout log

Saturday, January 5

For a long time, reading blogs is been my favorite past time. And the best tool so far ever is the Google Reader. I have had way many RSS feeds subscribed on my Google Reader. It is so many such that, the count of unread posts never fall down below 1k. Until recently I realised, that reading all this posts was just a formality and a way for me to decrease the unread count. I had created folders in Google reader and systematically categorised all the feeds. Blogs such as of Coding Horror, Joel on software were in "mustread" folder. Blogs such as nettuts were in a "Tutorials" folder and so on. Before, everyday my day would start with google reader on my desktop followed by emails and ToDo's. But things now have changed. With more of the reading done on my awesome smartphone, desktop is used only for working.Then i learned about hacker news, quora and Reddit. So started spending more time on these and Google reader was no more a primary resource of reading for me.Enter SmartphoneWith big screens, good data plans and to top it all very elegant and smartly designed apps, reading has been very delightful on smartphones and tablets. So, i then started reading during my free time while watching TV or just before heading to bed. Thus saving a lot of time for getting actual work done.I have been using Google Reader for android, BaconRead for reddit subscriptions, Quora's app for android, Hacker news app and also saving articles on Pockate for android.Time to Unsubscribe from Google Reader.I had a lot of Tutorials based subscriptions and reading code on a smartphone was not helping. I realised that I had subscribed to a wide range of topics and that was a little destracting. Plus reading a lot of code and just viewing a demo did not help at all and added up in the wasted time bucket. So the first thing for me was to get rid of all the tutorial based feeds.So now anything and everything interesting I wish to read is in the front page of either hacker news or reddit. Also I have kept to a minimum sub reddit subscriptions so as to avoid any unnecessary noise. If it is not on the front page, it is not interesting and worth spending time on.Enter Quora.Quora has been a favorite past time. It is a very good forum website and has a very high quality of questions and answers. No spam and also no unwanted ads. users actually spend a lot of time writing answers and they are very interesting and can be a good form of knowledge repository.

I recently also got BBC News app for my android.A very goood news app indeed and it is very well designed. The best part being it has no ads. So you actually like using such apps. They have ofcourse high quality articles not like Times of India or any other Indian newspaper per se. Plus the TOI app has adds. Its annoying.

To Conclude, this 2013, consume less on desktop, more on smartphone and get more work done.